The invention relates generally to the field of integrated circuits and in particular, to programmable logic integrated circuits. More specifically, the invention provides increased bandwidth operation for on-chip memory of a programmable logic integrated circuit.
Integrated circuits are important building blocks of the modern age. Technology continues to evolve and integrated circuits continue to provide improved functionality. As integrated circuits improve, so do the electronics systems that are built using integrated circuits. There are many types of integrated circuit such as memories, microprocessors, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and programmable logic. Programmable logic integrated circuits such as PALs, PLDs, FPGAs, LCDs, and others are becoming more complex and continually evolving to provide more user-programmable features on a single integrated circuit. Modern programmable logic integrated circuits incorporate programmable logic including logic gates, products terms, look-up tables, and combinations of these. Programmable logic integrated circuits also include embedded user-programmable memory or RAM.
Despite the success of programmable logic, there is a continuing desire to provide higher performance and greater functionality in programmable logic integrated circuits. For example, it is desirable to provide higher performance memory operation in a programmable logic integrated circuit. In other words, more memory operations, such as reading or writing, or both, may be performed in a given time. Faster data storage and retrieval from the programmable logic memory facilitates higher performance electronic systems.
Therefore, there is a need to provide techniques and circuitry to improve the performance of memories in an integrated circuit, especially in programmable logic integrated circuits.